Since the covid-19 pandemic started I had been waiting eagerly to go back to Thailand where I used to live for more than two years. When Thailand finally announced that they country would reopen for vaccinated tourists Sam and I took the chance to book flights and spend a month in Thailand during Christmas and New Years.
Not much had changed when we landed at Suvarnabumi airport, it all looked the same besides the excessive use of face masks and the long queues through immigration. The paper work (or rather QR code work) to be able to enter Thailand went fairly smooth and the only thing we had to do before being free was getting one more PCR test at one of the governmental approved SHA+ hotels where we had booked our first night in Bangkok. After four hours of room quarantine we got our test results and were free to go - and headed straight to Khao San road (out of all places we could go haha), to meet up with some friends. I had totally forgotten how loud and crazy it was on this bar street and could barely understand how I used to party there every night a few years ago.
During our first week in Thailand we stayed in Bangkok to catch up with old friends and colleagues from Mad Monkey, and it made me more happy than I could ever have imagined to be back in Bangkok again. I’d truly missed the vibe, the culture and language (it took some days but slowly my Thai started coming back too) and all the amazing food. Just getting mango and sticky rice from a street food vendor was pure happiness.
In Bangkok we visited my friend Jazz’s restaurant that she opened just before covid and sadly had to struggle with to make it go around during the lockdown in Bangkok. We had a great time combining a restaurant visit and catch up with a spontaneous cooking class where Jazz was teaching us how to make Tom Yum soup and Sam was teaching her how to make Belgian fries. As always when I’ve been visiting Jazz, we walked from there with full bellies.
We also had time to catch up with old colleagues and had a few wild nights out, despite the covid restrictions. According to the current restrictions, only restaurants were allowed to stay open and only until 22-23, and all bars and clubs had to stay closed. However, it’s Thailand, so we quickly realized that what the definition of a bar could be relative. Thanks to our local friends we still found places open until the late morning, where a bottle of Sangsom was a few euros. You can imagine how these nights ended…
The highlights of our first week of staying in Bangkok was definitely just the excitement and nostalgia of being back again, meeting people and eating good food. And visiting all the cool night markets. The vibrant atmosphere and mix of endless choices of street food is always a great experience.
After a week in Bangkok, where we had to work during the afternoon, we could take a two weeks vacation and decided to travel to the south to Hat Yai. Without further plans we landed 1,5 hours south and were met by a totally different climate; rain and humidity.
When the rain stopped we took the chance to explore Hat Yai city and found a few cool night markets, both the Greenway night market and Asia Night Bazaar. The highlight of the day was the tree hut restaurant Alive a bit outside the city center. This place was so cozy and almost magical with all it‘s lights and small stairs up to the trees, and the food was also really good!
The next day we were heading to Koh Lipe, a really small and quite unknown island west of Hat Yai in the Andaman sea. A minivan ride that was supposed to take an hour took three, a typical Thai experience that I’d almost missed somehow. Then we took a speedboat over to Koh Lipe, which also took a lot longer than supposed to since the boat stopped at other islands on the way.
Koh Lipe is maybe the most tropical island I’ve ever been to, the beaches has white sand and the water is crystal clear. It was also very quiet and not many other tourists (probably also because of the ongoing pandemic). On the boat there I got to know a nice Slovakian guy called Michal who we ended up hanging out with the whole day. In the evening we had some drinks in the Zodiac beach bar and watched a fire show, simple things that I enjoyed a lot - despite seeing so many fire shows before, a typical thing on most tourist islands in Thailand.
The next day the weather sadly changed abruptly and it was pouring down rain. The forecast showed that the next days on the island would be rainy, so we decided to book a boat ticket to Koh Lanta. We had to hurry back to our bungalow from the tour office to pick up our bags and then hurry back as the boat left at 9 am, but when we came back, sweaty after running to make it in time, we found out that there was no boat leaving. It was only going to leave the day after. Another typical Thai experience (that I hadn’t really missed).
Since we were all packed up we decided to take a speedboat back to the main land instead and go to Koh Lanta from there with a minivan. The speedboat ride was crazy, the young guy was driving extremely fast and we were just seven passenger onboard, trying to hold on to the boat to stay on. A woman next to us was puking. And I felt the breakfast Roti with banana coming up as well… we were back on the mainland just in an hour and I was relieved to finally get off the shaky boat.
The first night in Koh Lanta we stayed in a small very cheap bungalow, maybe too cheap, we got the insects inside the hut. But that’s maybe what you can expect from a 9€ place. The prices were a lot cheaper than other years due to covid, and the next two nights we booked a nicer bungalow by the beach for 30€ a night. And it was totally worth paying a bit more just to wake up to the sound of the waves, be able to jump straight in the water in the morning and never need to wear shoes when going to have lunch or dinner. There were so many nice beach bars and restaurants on our beach, but sadly most of them were empty. We talked to a few locals about this and they told us how much their businesses were struggling without the tourists. It seemed like all of the bars and restaurants were trying to get the handful of tourists to their place but in reality, there weren’t even enough people to fill up one of all the places.
Besides this, the Thai government announced the same day that they would close their borders to tourists again due to the new covid variant. The only way to enter Thailand was, once again, going to be by staying in a 7 day quarantine. We were lucky that we happened to enter Thailand through this short two months travel window, but felt sorry for all the local business owners who would suffer even more now when the tourists wouldn’t come even this year.
Despite the sadness of seeing all the businesses struggling, we enjoyed the chill vibe and empty beaches on Koh Lanta. We had a few chill days and did a snorkeling tour before we were heading to Krabi where we stayed for almost another week. We didn’t see many tourists in Krabi either and it was easy to find really nice but cheap accommodation. We stayed in Krabi town for Christmas Eve and had our Christmas dinner at The River restaurant which I highly recommend, super cozy and nice local food (as long as you can eat spicy). The night market is also a good place to have some nice local food. There we found a small street bar called Salin bar that had just opened and they served unbelievably tasty cocktails for just 100 THB. They even had real Brazilian importer Cashasa and made delicious craperinas.
Around the Krabi region there was actually a lot to do and see, we rented a motorbike and were driving around exploring everything from hiking trails to secret beaches. A nice early morning activity was the Dragons Creast mountain, a 2 hour hike thought the rainforest uphills to a viewpoint where you can (if you’re a bit earlier than we were) watch the sunrise. I always love to hike in the rainforest, the atmosphere is quite special with all the sounds; the wind blowing through the leaves of the trees, the birds singing and monkeys jumping from tree to tree causing this shaking sound in the trees. This time I felt a bit emotional and just couldn’t stop thinking about how so many parts of world’s rainforests have been destroyed and chopped down just to make space for palm tree plantations to make palm oil (something we see a lot here in Thailand) and for animal agriculture. It’s truly depressing thinking of these unique habitats for so many different species being destroyed forever.
Many parts of Krabi didn’t, surprisingly, feel very touristy or westernized and we found many local areas with very local food. Maybe even a bit too local… So local so they served intestine soup, not the best thing we’d tried I must say.
We also stayed two nights in Ao Nang by the beach south of Krabi town, where we met Top, our former colleague and the chef of Mad Monkey. He lived in Phuket nowadays and came driving on his motorbike all the way to Krabi just so see us on his day off. He took us to a really nice restaurant with great local seafood called the Hilltop Restaurant. The view for the sunset is also great there. It was a great experience trying some more local seafood like snails and black octopus that we might not have tried on our own.
Our last beach days of the trip we spent on Railey beach, a secluded beach outside Krabi that you can access with a long tail boat. On the way there we met two nice German girls who were eager to join us on a snorkeling tour the next day. We managed to get a private long tail boat with a driver just for us, for just 2000 THB divided on the five of us who eventually joined the tour. It was really worth going with a small private boat since the driver could take us around to the best snorkeling places where there weren’t many other tourists and he knew where we could see the most fish. He also taught us the smart trick of bringing a piece of cookie to feed the fish with, and in seconds you’d be surrounded by hundreds of fish eating straight out of your hand. This was by far the best snorkeling trip I’d ever done.
We also went to the four islands (the typical boat tour around Krabi) but this wasn’t as exciting since we’d already seen many photos of the Chicken island etc and these stops were quite crowded with other tourists, however, the great snorkeling experience weighted up for it.
Since Sam is such a good hustler, he also managed to get the boat driver to drive us all the way to Krabi town instead of back to Railey beach where we would have had to get another boat back, and we could make it just in time to the local bus station to catch the last bus to Takua Pa. This is a small town close to the famous Khao Sok national park, where we stayed one night before heading to our last stop on this trip; Ranong on the west shore of Thailand, just south of the border to Myanmar.
Takua Pa turned out to be more local than we expected, and a really small town where we hardly could get any taxi or find a restaurant that was open. We had to walk a few kilometers to our hotel (that seemed completely empty and probably never had western tourists staying there before). As always in dark small alleys in small towns in Thailand there were a group of stray dogs barking at us, and from previous traumatic experiences when dogs in the darkness here we had to gain all our courage to make it to the hotel. After checking in we tried to make it back to the “center” to have something to eat, but eventually asked a policeman to call for a moped guy who picked us up and drove us there. Later we felt embarrassed for being so scared of the dogs, but at least the moped guy also drove us back to our hotel after dinner.
As always in Thailand, the least good looking restaurants are usually the best ones. Not many were open late but we found one (called ร้าน ฮกกี่เหลา in Thai, it doesn’t have an English name), that didn’t look special but was on the Michelin guide list! The food was really nice and tasty, and from the first bad experience with the dogs in Takua Pa, we now liked this local town even better.
The next morning we went to the bus station early to catch the first bus to Ranong. However, there was no bus before 11.30, and eventually when we came back to the bus station at that time, there was no bus going that time. The next one was at 14.30, but that one was fully booked. Eventually we got a ticket for the 5pm bus, that ended up leaving after 6pm… a typical Thai experience again.
Well, there was nothing to do other than accept it and trying to see a bit of Takua Pa. We paid a local guy with a small truck to take us around to the Old town of Takua Pa and to a kayak trip a bit outside the city. That way we made the time pass, and eventually we finally got on the bus.
Ranong is not a very touristy place, which was one of the reasons we wanted to go there. We stayed in a really nice recently opened hotel called The LoftSpace hotel, owned by a young couple who where more than happy to help us out with anything we asked for.
We arrived in Ranong late at night and the next morning it was New Year’s Eve, and we had not really figured out how to spend the day yet. Quickly we realized that Ranong was smaller than we thought and we wouldn’t find any New Year’s Eve celebration there, especially now during the current covid restrictions, and got the advice from a few locals to go to Koh Phayam, a small island outside Ranong. Again, we realized we were too last minute with making plans. Many young locals from Ranong also go to Koh Phayam for New Year’s Eve (that’s a big celebration all over Thailand), and boat tickets were sold out everywhere. We only got tickets for the last boat of the day, leaving at 4 pm. Shortly after we also found out that all night buses to Bangkok were sold out for Sunday evening, and we had to book a bus for the next day, and could only spend one night on Koh Phayam. Our vacation got just shorter and shorter.
However, things had still been going fairly smooth the whole trip and we were happy to get the chance to go to the island. Koh Phayam is not one of the well known touristy islands and was surprisingly quiet, uninhabited with a lot of beautiful nature. A few factors stood out straight away: no 7-eleven on the whole island, no beach sellers, no typical tourist stores selling beach stuff and clothes… just very peaceful small streets and beautiful long beaches. There were no cars on the island, just motorbikes. But since we were too last minute with all our plans, all the motorbikes where also rented out already when we arrived…so we had to explore the little we had time to see if Koh Phayam by foot.
We stayed in Smile Bungalows which definitely weren’t anything luxurious (we had a roommate, a giant gecko, as soon as we entered our bungalow). But the location was nice by the beach and we could hear the sound of the waves.
We joined the main New Year’s Eve party on Long Beach and which turned out to be a much wilder party than we expected (covid restrictions didn’t seem to exist on the islands, neither do face masks…). It seemed like the whole island gathered for this beach party and the vibe was really nice. No “typical tourists” or backpackers but mainly locals and a few expats, and some tourists that knew Thailand well and used to come back to Koh Phayam every year. We quickly made friends thanks to the social vibe (and some alcohol). The fire works were the scariest I ever experienced straight on the beach, but it was a really great party that went on until very late.
The next day was our last before going back to Bangkok, and we enjoyed a chill beach day to recover from the hangover. In the evening we returned to the main land and took a night bus from Ranong to Bangkok.
Since we arrived one day earlier in Bangkok than planned initially we had time to explore most of China town, which definitely is one of my favorite areas in Bangkok. It’s just something with the vibe, the smell, the sounds, the small alleys…
The last week in Bangkok we were working remotely but had time to hang out with our friends, eat at new nice restaurants and see areas of Bangkok that we still hadn’t been to.
It felt truly sad to return home to a cold and dark January in Stockholm, but I’m also truly grateful for the opportunity we got to travel for a whole month, consider that the pandemic still isn’t over. Both Sam and I felt like we fell in love with Bangkok once again, so who knows, maybe next time we return for good. I hope that one day I will live in this vibrant city and this amazing country of Thailand again, but until then, I will live thought this winter with all the nice memories from this trip.
Here below I’ve listed some recommendations for restaurants to go to in Bangkok and around in the places we visited in Thailand.
Bangkok
CoCo Walk (especially Grandma's!) in Ratchathewi
Jasmin Siam kitchen in Ratchathewi (it’s my friend Jazz’s restaurant and she cooks amazing authentic Thai food)
Boonlang braised chicken noodles (the owner is so sweet and she worked in many Michelin star restaurants before so she cooks amazing food, try the dry Khao Soi!)
Tony’s place (Nepalese) in China town. Check out the new small street by the Klong (canal) there, it's a recently remade nice area
Meet in Silom (authentic Chinese food, went there with my good Chinese friend. The owner is also Chinese)
Taling Pling (local food in a nice restaurant in sukhumvit)
Chang Chui market (a really cool and local artsy night market with a big airplane in the middle, and a lot of cool art)
Jodd's Fair (a new central night market with a hipster vibe and lots of good food)
Udon Suk Walk (a very local night market quite far outside the city but worth a visit due to the nice local food and thai live music)
Startosphere (a nice rooftop bar by Vicotry monument where you can overlook the city and listen to local live music all night. My friend Rot makes good cocktails there)
Tichuca Rooftop bar (a new rooftop bar on the 48th floor on the T-One Building. A really cool vibe and an amazing view)
Brewski (a rooftop bar on top of the Radisson building on the 30th floor, with a vide selection of craft beers and affordable food. No need to dress fancy for this place, which is usually the case with most other rooftop bars)
Hat Yai
Alive (treehouse outdoor restaurant and bar with a cool vibe and affordable good local food)
Greenway Night Market (a hipster local night market with a vide selection of food and good shopping for cheap clothes)
The Asean Night Bazaar (also a local lively night market)
Koh Lanta
The Blue Moon Beach bar (we came here almost every day for cheap cocktails and a good beach vibe. You can borrow beach toys and games for free)
Mays kitchen (a local restaurant with good food and drinks)
Krabi Town
The River restaurant (a cozy and more fancy restaurant by the river with really nice sea food and live music, usually jazz and soul)
Krabi Night market, especially Salin's bar if it's still there
Koh Phayam
Homemade Bakery (a must to try when on Koh Phayam if you want really good breakfast! A small simple place but with delicious baguetts and pastries. Well known on the whole island)
Bamboo Bungalows (good food and nice view on the beach - try the cheese sandwich with homebaked bread)
If you are ever going to Thailand and want more local tips, please don't hesitate to get in touch with me. Hope you enjoyed reading and getting some sunny Thailand vibes during these dark and cold days.